The article highlights how investment in OR is essential to the effort to end TB, by effectively implementing proven interventions, showing how new products can be introduced and deployed, and by ensuring that they are available to everyone who needs them, using people-centred approaches.

To address issues of demand and capacity, the editorial makes three key recommendations:

the Global Fund should identify a cost category for TB-related OR;

Fund Portfolio Managers should be aware of the benefits of OR and how this should be conducted, monitored and evaluated; and

the outcomes of any research supported by the Global Fund should be tracked and reported by the Fund.

Professor Tony Harries, Senior Advisor (Research) and lead author, said: “To achieve the targets identified in the United Nations High-Level Meeting (UN HLM) on TB, and to realise our ambition to end TB, will require significant investment in OR. In support of this, the Global Fund needs to make OR capacity building and OR a priority.”

In April 2019, The Union held a webinar on Embedding operational research into a National Tuberculosis Control Programme (now open access). The webinar focussed on how OR, if relevant and well-conducted, can improve the performance of national TB control programmes. Webinar participants reported difficulties in obtaining funding for OR, with several pinpointing the Global Fund’s lack of support for national programme-directed OR.

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